"...internally developed and maintained for a fraction of that cost over the products lifecycle."
Now, imagining a lifecycle of this specific app in question of 5 years, are you suggesting that a total spend of $900k for the SaaS would be LESS than developing and maintaining this one tool internally?
Not sure how to ask this without it sounding combative, because i don't intend that.. but, does that matter?
Ie there's a lot of causes in adult behavior that could be tied or contributed to by their childhood, ie another adults behavior and decisions. I struggle to understand the action items with that information, though.
I desire more mental health funding and etc, so i'm not criticizing any attempt to do something. Rather i struggle to imagine what the state's solution would be to a lack of fathers.
United States policy has contributed immensely to a lack of fathers. A father begins to lose his rights at the moment of fertilization. They are last in line for custody or visitation after a divorce (including the no-fault ones), but they're the first ones on the hook for child support. If there's welfare support for Women-Infants-Children, why should we keep Dad around?
A dearth of legal rights has acted synergistically with cultural changes to alienate children from their fathers, and so the children seek out authority figures and acceptance in gangs, or sports, or social media.
This is what it looks like when you're smashing the patriarchy and cancelling the patriarchs.
I am skeptical, can you link to some statistics for fathers who wanted custody or visitation and were not granted that? Excluding obvious reasons like conviction for a violent crime or something.
I'm legitimately unsure here but how are single parents incentivized financially? That's an environment that I am wholly unfamiliar with so I really have no context.
They are saying financial incentives should be to force people together vs support single parents. The unsaid part is to encourage, through policy, marriage and traditional family structures by way of less access to secular social safety programs. The problem is that this leads to people being forced to stay in abusive or unhealthy relationships because of someone else's ideology.
If you work backwards further, you'll find you're unable to fix dysfunctional relationships through economic policy. ~40% of annual pregnancies in the US are unintended, so perhaps more accessible family planning is what is needed, so that people who don't want to be parents don't become parents.
"The world is never unhappy because of children who have not yet been born; it is grief stricken by children who have been placed on the planet without anyone to love them adequately. We can cope with fewer children, we can't cope with yet more parents insufficiently dedicated to the tasks of love." -- Unknown
Given the GP's statistic, I think you could argue that raising a child fatherless is itself unhealthy and abusive. How we weigh one harm against the other is a sticky mess, but we could probably start by curbing no-fault divorces, at least when kids are involved. Let people get divorces in cases of abuse, but "we got bored of each other" divorces harm kids and the rest of society pays the price.
Agree to disagree. You only get one life, and then you die. Having children shouldn't be an emotional death sentence if your marriage sucks (50% of first marriages end in divorce, 60%+ for second marriages). You can coparent just fine divorced if both parents are involved, financially stable, and emotionally well adjusted. You can even have children without being married. The economic part is the primary problem (having kids one can't afford). Forcing people economically (using policy) into longterm unhappiness will not lead to the desired outcome.
Tangentially, there are ~400k children in foster care in the US at any moment in time, roughly 1/4 of which are adoptable. No one adopts them, and then they age out into adulthood. What happens next as adults, the statistics are grim (roughly 25 percent become homeless).
So, these various datasets leads me to the conclusion that we have a long way to go to help people who don't want kids to not have them (while still robustly supporting parents who very much want to parent). This, I believe, will lead to better outcomes overall. I also argue society wants healthy productive citizens who will be taxpayers and generate productivity, but doesn't give a damn about helping parents or struggling children (you would think advocates of universal school lunches were asking for someone's head on a platter, for example), so society deserves what it gets in that regard until it's ready to invest. Talk is cheap.
> Manipulate the incentive structure so that it does not financially incentivize single parents.
I hope not.
Everybody wants a "more simplified tax code" except they all want their own credit/deduction/exemption/whatever.
This is how we end up with nonsense like the masters exemption.
> This IRS exemption allows homeowners to exclude up to two weeks of rental income from their taxable income.
The 'space wasted' on an estate of many hundreds, if not, thousands of acres is minimal. Given that often the bricks used were made and fired on site, it definitely saved on resources and labour.
There's a stately home close to me that has a very short run of one of these walls, and the remains of the old brick kiln up on the hill side. If you know what you're looking for, you can also still see the hollows in the ground where the clay was dug, now fill of trees and bushes.
A single repetition of the wave is misleading. For N repetitions of the wave you need N + 1 buttresses not 2 N.
Also, while brick is stronger in compression a buttress increases toppling resistance in both directions so you need to consider material properties not just the geometry.
But the math depends so strongly on how often the buttresses are needed, and the length of the buttresses, so you can't assume those things. The goal is a wall of equivalent strength, after all. If equivalent strength needs slightly less distance, or slightly smaller buttresses, the result could be thrown completely off in either direction.
> *A straight wall of the approximal strength and length of a wavy wall, not just length.
The article suggests that, if you attempted to build a straight wall with a similar amount of bricks, that it would not be able to be freestanding (i.e. it would need to be buttressed or it would fall over). That's a significant feature of a wall to some people, so I don't think it's fair to dismiss the utility of that by suggesting that it's simply "less bricks for comparable strength," it's "less bricks for a freestanding wall."
If you want a freestanding brick wall, this seems to be the "ideal" way to do it, assuming you have the space required for the wave. I think the space needed would be a function of the wall height, so if you need a tall wall, you need more horizontal space for the wave and a wavey wall becomes less ideal.
> so if you need a tall wall, you need more horizontal space for the wave and a wavey wall becomes less ideal.
Not necessarily. You might need a straight wall to be thicker or have more buttressing in that case as well. The requirements for each (waviness, thickness, buttressing) likely change to different degrees based on height, so wavy walls could become less ideal, or they could become more ideal.
Indeed. Historically these walls have been used in orchards, where they are ideal. The wall serves an important function: it buffers heat. This can make all the difference, especially in late frosts, which are doom for the bloom. Of course, the added warmth can also mean you can grow varieties in a colder climate that you normally wouldn't be able to.
Serpentine or Crinkle-Crankle walls, apparently a Dutch innovation.
> Although it's actually longer than a linear wall, a serpentine wall economizes on materials because the wall can be made strong enough with just one brick thin. The alternate convex and concave curves in the wall provide stability and help to resist lateral forces. Furthermore, the slopes give a warmer microclimate than a flat wall. This was obviously important for the Dutch, who are almost 400 km north of Paris.
> Variants of the serpentine wall had recessed and protruding parts with more angular forms. Few of these seem to have been built outside the Netherlands, with the exception of those erected by the Dutch in the eastern parts of England (two thirds of them in Suffolk county). In their own country, the Dutch built fruit walls as high up north as Groningen (53°N).
It depends how you define "wasted". If it were a flat wall, it'd give the interior more space by just pushing it out to the furthest point in the wavy wall. I guess you could say that whatever the magnitude of the wall is would be wasted.
If you own a large amount of land than the savings add up. Especially if you live 250 years ago (or you want to match the walls from then) when bricks were not produced and delivered in massive industrial processes and large estates were more common.
Even in the modern era the cost is still relevant. Bricks are still pretty expensive.
If I have 100 acres (square), I need ~2.5 km of wall, at ~150,000 bricks for a 1m wall single brick-width wall (deter animals, mark property).
At the online prices I'm seeing ($0.65), that's ~$100,000. If I have to make it all double width, suddenly its $200,000. $100,000 delta is still pretty relevant for a modern small scale farmer.
Drive through rural northern England and you will see vast numbers of sheep moving through pastures that are bordered by old dry-stone walls. The roads will even have equestrian gates alongside them when they have stock grids to prevent the sheep from using the road.
It's all about adapting to local materials. The same technique was used by early settlers in New England (think about the ending of The Shawshank Redemption) because they had to get the stones out of the ground in order to plow and harvest - rather than just make a pile, they used the stones to build walls separating fields.
Depends on how long you intend to keep livestock and what materials you have access to. Well built walls can last a lot longer than well built fences; but fences may be less costly initially. But it might also depend on how crafty/destructive your livestock is.
I have a few acres of land and annoying neighbours. Stuff like this is relevant (though in the end I just went with hedging, which is cheaper and good enough for privacy)
They were also dirt poor by current standards after industrialism started. It was well into the 19th century that laws like the Education Act of 1870 and the Trade Union Act of 1871 started distributing power to the common people of Britain outside of the traditional quasi-feudal system.
this is an overly cynical take. headlines are brief by necessity. nobody would read that and think that a curved line from A to B is shorter than a straight line between the same points.
the first paragraph explains it,
> these wavy walls actually use less bricks than a straight wall because they can be made just one brick thin, while a straight wall—without buttresses—would easily topple over
No space is wasted, unless you need to squeeze in a rectangle thing (e.g. tennis court, driveway) into a tight lot. But boundary disputes in urban areas are already bad enough so trying to define a wavey boundary wont be fun! That said how much freaking character would this add to a back garden!
Yes, it's clickbait and nonsense. Obviously a straight wall would use fewer bricks. Your brick wall is going to be one brick thick either way, nobody is going to try to somehow make the straight wall as strong as the wavy wall. Most likely the straight wall is already way stronger than it needs to be.
If either design is too strong, then over could just use thinner bricks.
However, as the article indicates, the straight wall would not be as stable as the wavy wall. It needs buttresses to prevent toppling. That's the key advantage of the wavy design.
I read the title and thought "duh". Maybe others were intrigued and clicked, but for me, this is just obvious. I had lots of legos, and own more now as a grandpa than, er, uh, I should. I guess spatial reasoning about bricks just is second hand at this point.
What the article likely leaves out, is that the all of the "corner only" touch points are going to create a more "pourous" wall. And collection points for crap.
You can see from the photos in the article that the amount of waviness is not so large as to result in large angles between adjacent bricks -- the usual mortar between bricks connects them and doesn't even look like it's all that much larger a mortar join than for a straight wall.
While almost everyone seems to be fixated on various housing market minutia in justifiably passionate anger/frustration at the entire situation, very little attention is given to the causational elephant in the room:
The Federal Reserves monetary policy as a whole, but more specifically their authorization by the Federal Open Market Committee to buy Mortgage Backed Securities (MBS) directly from the banks. The Fed had ZERO MBS on their balance sheet prior to 01/05/19 (1) and now hold an staggering $2.7 trillion dollars worth, which represents 22% of the entire MBS market in the US (3).
This is the dirty secret in the modern US housing market, we never actually saw the true bottom of the 2008 housing crash due to the FEDs MBS interventions.
We know that monetary factors (like the federal reserve) can't be the main casual factor because rents are increasing at very low vacancy rates at the same (if not higher) rate as the price of housing.
If the fed was the primary factor we would see a divergence between housing prices and rent since the fed has minimal direct effects on rent.
Looking at the data, the primary driver is simply that more people are competing to live in urban centers as we have banned the construction of additional housing in most cities.
One of the unique beauties of aging is getting to witness the rhyming of history.
~40 years ago it was roller skates
~30 years ago it was roller blades
~20 years ago it was roller shoes
~10 years ago we began to see the wide adoption of battery powered personal transporating devices
sidenote: Anyone else notice the twice mention of Tesla in the promo video?
The mentions of Tesla jumped out at me. It was kind of jarring, since the brand doesn't have the cachet it did only a few months ago. I wonder if they were re-shooting the video today if they'd still mention it.
The mentions to Tesla were off putting to me. It reminded me of when when recruiters try to brag about being founded by ex-Google/Amazon/Microsoft people. If that’s what you choose to sell yourself, imma pass.
Timmy Davis is not an alcoholic. But like many twenty-something students, he's worried he may be drinking too much.
And cutting down isn't easy. The feel-good memory associations that our minds create – between the sight of a cold pint of beer and pleasure, for instance – lead to the cravings that sustain addictive behaviour, and cause us to relapse.
Dr. Ravi Das is a neuropsychopharmacologist at University College London whose research explores whether we can intervene in addiction by weakening those memories. His latest experiment theorises that ketamine – a controlled drug notorious for its recreational use (to attain a state of intense dissociation and incapacitation described as a 'K-hole') – may have the makings of the elusive 'forgetting pill' – a drug that, administered under correct clinical conditions, can weaken specific memories safely.
Timmy has volunteered for Dr. Das' latest experiment, in which 90 volunteers will receive a ketamine infusion in a controlled setting. Timmy is no stranger to psychedelics. But could a drug he has previously encountered recreationally really help him cut down his drinking?
High Society is a VICE documentary series about drugs in the UK.
In October 1990, García, then a Tucson-based real estate developer pleaded guilty to a felony bank fraud charge for his role as a straw borrower in the collapse of Charles Keating's Lincoln Savings and Loan Association.[4][5] Garcia "fraudulently obtained a $30-million line of credit in a series of transactions that also helped Lincoln hide its ownership in risky desert Arizona land from regulators."[4] Garcia spent three years on probation, and he and his firm filed for bankruptcy.[5]
In 1991, García bought Ugly Duckling, a bankrupt rent-a-car franchise, for under $1 million and merged it with his own fledgling finance company, and turned it into a company selling and financing used cars for sub-prime buyers with poor credit history.[5] Garcia took the company public on the NASDAQ exchange in 1996, trading under the ticker "UGLY".[6] In 1999, Garcia was involved in six lawsuits alleging he had "abused his position to profit" from a real estate deal where he ultimately acquired 17 company properties at a 10% discount.[5] In 2002, Garcia and the former Ugly Duckling CEO, Gregory Sullivan, took the company private and renamed it DriveTime.[7]
"From a rough calculation, the flash appeared to give off more light than 1,000 trillion suns."
Can any space geeks chime in on this one?
Does this mean the emission of light from the sun at a single point in time x 10^15? My brain pretty much divides by zero even trying to comprehend such a large number and I'm just trying to grasp the relationship of the emitted light to our sun.
As others have said, its not quite the same as the Sun's output, but it is still an incredible amount of light.
I have studied blazars fairly extensively in the past and you are right that the brain cant really fathom the 'real world' appearance of these things. I resort to just thinking in terms of number of photons and avoid thinking about the rest, as it tends to result in a lot of existential dread and drinking.
One way of thinking about this is in terms of incident sunlight at Earth's orbit.
A trillion is a rather large number. Some quick maths says that 1,000 trillion cm^2 is 100,000 km^2, or a region roughly 315 km on a side (195 miles), or a circle with a radius of about 126 km (77 mi).
Alternatively, if you consider sunlight falling on a patch of ground for one second, the amount reaching it over 1 trillion seconds would take about 32,000 years.
So think in terms of a very large magnifying glass (I'd suggest considering a Fresnel lens for economy's sake), or a very long-term accumulator.
> My brain pretty much divides by zero even trying to comprehend such a large number
I've tried using this line in the wrong company that wasn't math oriented, and it fell flat.
It's also amusing your use of this phrase, as in a lot of the astronomy circles I've seen/read, there's a joke that black holes are where god divided by zero. So it felt very apropos to me in this context too.
Maybe someone can help illuminate a nagging question I've had for quite sometime around this whole FTX debacle:
Practically every single VC seed round story I've heard from new/young founders is that the process is nothing short of a colonoscopy into not only their business, but also their professional network, and even their personal lives!
I look at the list of institutional investors, from the "big boys" in the VC game, to pension funds and I can't for the life of me believe the current narrative that every level of due diligence checks seemed to fail in this single edge case.
From a systems perspective this doesn't make me think "oh what a crazy one off, people must have been sleeping at the wheel", this makes me think "this isn't a bug, this is a feature."
So the real question is, how many more proverbial rotten apples are in the basket of VC?
Due diligence is for the founders and startups that the VCs aren't that excited about. When the VCs really want something, due diligence, especially the sort you mention, and any sort of business plan / model / etc goes out the window. They'll fall over themselves to get a piece of the action in some hot company in some hot market, even if the founders are total jerks, the company has no real business plan or model, and the long term plans are vague. The startup funding game is all about investing in startups as a financial asset, not in startups as a sustainable business. VCs will put you through the "you need traction" "you need a business plan" "we need lots of due diligence" if they aren't that into you or you're an option vs. an opportunity. Venture capital is a hustle, and you have to know how to play the game. Most startup founders play VC as if they're going to a bank and getting a loan and have to justify everything, when VC investing is really about pattern matching and lots of gut reactions, and VCs are investing in what they believe is a chunk of something that will be worth more in the future. The actual business and startup founders are only the side part of that hustle.
> When the VCs really want something, due diligence, especially the sort you mention, and any sort of business plan / model / etc goes out the window.
Indeed. Post FTX, Sequoia not only scrubbed the hagiography of SBF from their site, they also scrubbed a story about how they went from meeting to funding company in 48 hours. Not sure how much due diligence you can do in that time frame.
"Update: CNET's Caroline McCarthy tweets at us: "Sounds like a good theory, except that a Color exec told me Sequoia's $$ was nearly triple Bain's." So we're back to: HOW DID THIS HAPPEN?"
So Sequoia put in nearly triple what Bain put in. The article was just guessing before the update.
This sounds right. Theranos is a case example - if the investors had hired any independent experts in the technology sector, micro-fluidics for biochemical analysis, they'd have immediately told them that quantitative measurements (i.e. getting blood metabolite levels) at that scale were essentially impossible, although +/- testing (i.e. detection of a virus, or a gene sequence) was more plausible.
Restricting Theranos to +/- testing (STDs and other infectious diseases, maybe some cancer genes) would be FAR less profitable than taking over the blood testing industry, which is probably why Theranos didn't go in that direction. Regardless, even cursory due diligence would have revealed all that.
I've read a lot about the Theranos situation, and it sounds like CVS might be the "survivor" in this case. There are a few references to CVS in Bad Blood and other reports, but CVS wisely didn't say much about what caused them to pass on the offer that Walgreens accepted.
When I sold my smallish venture a year back I got around 400 due diligence questions. I answered them, put the material together.
From questions later on it became pretty obvious not one person, not the legal or operations team of the acquirer had look at anything I'd handed over.
I think this is a mixture of laziness and also that these due diligences are done for legal liability reasons, i.e. you can look at the materials if there ever is a lawsuit, not before.
But this is just an anecdote, this obviously depends on the acquirer, I'm sure plenty of companies do it properly.
Acquisition due diligence is not the same as funding due diligence. There are definitely differences in the two and different reasons for doing it. For acquisition, due diligence is part of the legal and compliance requirements. For VC, due diligence is supposed to be part of the deal vetting process, but it's usually a headache for everyone, and goes out the window when they want to move fast.
Yeah, in the case of an acquisition, the acquirer can acquire all sorts of unsavory things – liability, debt, contractual obligations, lawsuits, etc that could potentially harm the acquirer.
In the case of funding, the worst possible outcome is that they write off the investment, like in the case of Sequoia and FTX.
There is enough due diligence to cover ass. I think what surprises people is that peoples asses were actually covered. What exactly did e.g. Sequoia see to give them confidence that there would not be significant cost if things went sideways? I guess you can always say its not illegal to invest poorly. But is it illegal to fund a house of cards where your position is to get a good deal on the inside of a potentially lucrative ponzi scheme? I think the whole thing is a good lesson for common (especially young) investors... care about and think in the longterm ... what is your nest-egg invested in? If things go sideways there's not great guarantees of which groups receive a prop-up and which are allowed to fall.
How many of these VCs used their reputations to pump shit coins (which they got along with equity when they invested in these Ponzis) then sold the shit coins to retail investors?
Doesn’t collecting the material but not looking at it actually create risk and liability rather than reducing? For example, take the extreme that you answered one of the questions with admitting to selling to a sanctioned country. Well, they knew about it and have record of knowing about it but acquired anyway because they never looked at the materials.
Yes. If you get sued as a company for e.g. negligence, and it's pretty clear you're not going to win by attacking the point directly, the two go-to arguments are:
1. I did not know, and whilst I have a duty to know, in this case I was intentionally misled by others and couldn't have possibly known: I _did_ do my DD on asking for this information, however, I was lied to.
2. Okay, you got me, you win your case. Now I go sue the seller for having failed to disclose and making them pay me the same amount as I have to pay you.
Both of which are severely hampered by not reading the DD. At best you could say that by not doing the DD at all, you insta-lose on the first point (you have a duty to ask, if you can't show that you asked, you lose immediately). However, given that you now received it, it seems like a significant misunderstanding of the situation if you then don't get some intern to read it and highlight dubious lines and cross check a few things.
It's possible this is just the same shit moneyball is about: Lawyers putting a lot of stock in looking around and seeing what the rest of the lawyer clan does, and not using the brain whatsoever, trusting _entirely_ on the gut instinct of 'yes, this feels familiar and it is what we all always do, therefore, surely it must be fine'.
Case in point: Email footers claiming 'if you aren't the intended recipient, you must delete it; all this stuff is confidential' are fucking retarded. Obviously it's not legally binding (if it was, I can wrap a note 'you indemnify me by receiving this object' around a brick and throw it through your window!), it looks stupid if it's at the bottom of e.g. a press release you mailed to a newspaper, 'not the intended recipient' is not something you could possibly prove (hey, you mailed it to me, therefore I am the intended recipient), and by not suing those in evident breach of your clause, you establish that you don't enforce it. If you then attempt to sue somebody for disclosing actually private information that was clearly under NDA or whatnot, they can make a plausible defense in court that you never sue anybody for it and that therefore this is just picking and choosing, which has some legal legs.
And yet _every lawyer office and almost all businesses with a legal team_ does this, as do many companies with nothing like it (presumably, those'd be cargo culting, the legal companies / companies with legal teams are actively lemmings jumping off the cliff to follow their pals).
Possibly they do it because they know others expect them to, but I find it dubious that it's a good idea to actively do stupid shit just because people _think_ it's smart. It's not like having a footer makes you stand out these days. On the contrary.
) Yes, disney movie, lemmings don't actually do that. Which makes these companies even dumber, no?
Obvious to you, but not quite factually correct. This is, of course, not an attempt to form a contract or NDA (which would be ridiculous) but instead, an attempt to put a certain kind of recipient in notice.
Lawyers operate under ethical rules which differ slightly state-to-state but are largely based on the ABA model rules of professional conduct. Check out Rule 4.4:
“A lawyer who receives a document… and knows or reasonably should know that the document… was inadvertently sent shall promptly notify the sender.”
The standard footer is part of making sure the recipient “reasonably should know” that a document not intended for him is not intended for him.
Now, obviously, this warning is not binding on you in any significant way, but it likely has some effect on your lawyer, assuming he is licensed in a state that puts such a responsibility on him.
Your conclusion about the legal effect of the brick thrown through a window is probably correct, however.
As you suggest, I'm not sure how typical that is, and it would very much depend on the acquirer. We've made quite a few acquisitions over the years, and there have been other potential acquisitions where we've chosen not to proceed due to something that's come out during DD. That's not to say we've never had any mess to clean up post-acqusition, but it's always been mess that we were aware of either through early conversations or through the DD process.
> Practically every single VC seed round story I've heard from new/young founders is that the process is nothing short of a colonoscopy into not only their business, but also their professional network, and even their personal lives!
I’ve seen two groups of founders here. One knows how to say the right things, spin data the right way, have the right credentials, and know the right people, to avoid substantive due diligence. The others don’t, and end up getting a colonoscopy and then likely a “you’re too early” or “you’re too far along”.
> So the real question is, how many more proverbial rotten apples are in the basket of VC?
I don’t have a bird’s eye view, but my few data point me towards most VCs convincing themselves that they’re rigorous, when they ultimately rely on subjective criteria and so are quite vulnerable to con artist founders who know how to make them feel good.
VCs with rigorous process get out-competed by the ones that jumped at garbage companies that racked up huge valuations and then cashed out. VC isn't about making good companies, it's about cashing out. There's no value in the business actually being good, only in it being hyped up.
I once had an investor who I thought was a great fit for both me and the business. We clicked on every level. We shared the same goals, philosophy, way of thinking about things. I loved him.
A few days before making his decision, he called me at 11pm. I knew exactly what was happening. If I didn't pick up, he probably would think I'm a 9-5'er (which I'm not).
If I did, I would probably be getting into a long-term relationship with a guy who considered him more important than my family. He'd probably want me jumping on planes at the last second to show him slides, mentoring his other founders, etc.
This wasn't my first deal. I was successful. I decided to not pick up.
The deal fell through, predictably. But I couldn't be happier with my decision.
> Practically every single VC seed round story I've heard from new/young founders is that the process is nothing short of a colonoscopy into not only their business, but also their professional network, and even their personal lives!
Really? Y Combinator is famous for its lack of due diligence, and making decisions based on a web form submitted to get to inperson interviews and then a 10 minute meeting to make an investment.
And the biggest VC's of the past few years, Tiger Global and SoftBank did almost no diligence.
The other big VC's in AZ and Sequoia are also known for moving very quickly and not being very onerous with their due diligence.
I guess it could be that most of the VC stories you have heard are from 2nd and 3rd tier VC's who have to be far more thorough?
Go read the infamous Sequoia Capital article and despair at the fact that these wildly wealthy people who comprise the investor class and wield inordinate, unimaginable amounts of unilateral power are just as stupid as the rest of us.
at least part of the answer is that SBF consciously designed his fundraising process (entering ratcheting commitments with an extremely short time frame) to cause FOMO and waive due diligence
In my experience it's a class thing. If you have the type of pedigree where you parents, friends or family can put in $100k plus to allow a founder or two to pay their living expenses while they get it running and secure seed or round A funding. It's always a catch 22, serious investors want one or more of the founders to be full time dedicated to invest, and that founder needs to pay their living expenses while doing so. In my experience the founders that get funded are either people with the pedigree that comes with money, or people that are experts on their field, have worked whole careers in industry and have some money socked away to float themselves for a year or two while they get it going. There is a third category of consultants/freelancers that create products as a thing to work on when consulting is slow, but these are often bootstrapping type things that don't really go looking for money.
I share the nagging question! The only thing I can think of is that he was "making money" quickly, showing his skills as a trader. This...greed...might have been blinding to the investors.
Where angel Investors or VC will gamble with an unknown founder and their untried product, SBF was making money and the product seemed too good to fail?
The part of the story I am curious about is that I know in some cases VCs got issues some tokens along with their shares. There is the possibility that they knew they would get enough tokens and be able to dump them to make the deal make sense because the tokens could be instant profit. They say, we lost $x m investment. (PS: the fund is up, we sold $x+y coins)
Or it could have just been FOMO.
I feel sorry for the Ontario Teacher's Unions. Keep in mind with these frauds the money is coming from insurance company, your school endowment, etc. It's not other people's money.
Check out the NS8 story. They were audited by one of the big firms and still passed and got funding when it was a fraud. Lightspeed was the lead VC. Maybe they are moving a little too fast.
The only way to get out of your investment with FTX in time would be if you had negotiated some clause to that effect in your funding round (like warrants/put options on the shares), which no one seems to have done, and which SBF is unlikely to have accepted.
There’s a difference: no seed investors. Alameda was already operating, funded by cash (supposedly?) made from a kind of carry trade on some restricted cryptocurrencies. So ppl were putting money into an already operating business.
There’s still no excuse for zero diligence, much less zero oversight (they couldn’t even produce a balance sheet??). But the situations aren’t parallel.
Well this is part of what creates the conspiracy theory that some state actors were behind FTX. At the very least, the fact that SBF's mom was fixer for the Democrats, means he was likely Epstein level connected with political insiders.
More conspiratorily, while SBF's mom worked for a Democrat-aligned dark-money PAC, Sam Bankman-Fried himself is rumored to have donated more than a $100 million to Republican dark-money PACs during the general election, and multiple Republican sources confirm that a person in the crypto industry was their "white knight donor" for a number of Senate GOP campaigns.
VCs were already bullish on crypto, and Alameda was already printing money. They thought there was less risk than there was and any delay would let other VCs get in on their spot.
Ok. Personally I'm tired of voicing unpopular opinions to people who don't want to hear them. (Guess my age.)
Not everything is in teh cloudz or likely to be in the cloud. The "cloud" is not everywhere (look at some datacenter maps; according to The Register 70% of W EU cloud spend goes to US companies https://www.theregister.com/2022/09/29/aws_microsoft_google_...). There is a real (careful with that word; as in "real estate") notion of sovereignity.
Did you read _Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas_? What is Defcon / Blackhat? What has the latest "wave (from the coast) that floats all boats" turned out to be? What has it wrought?
As another commenter observes, you're seldom more than two seconds from disaster when driving a car. It remains to be seen whether the road ends, or rather that people have confused "carefree" with "careless".
"...internally developed and maintained for a fraction of that cost over the products lifecycle."
Now, imagining a lifecycle of this specific app in question of 5 years, are you suggesting that a total spend of $900k for the SaaS would be LESS than developing and maintaining this one tool internally?